“Death Didn’t Become Him”

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Bo depends on intimate interaction for life sustenance. As a succubus, it is what keeps her going, and in that sense, it’s only logical that romantic drama would follow her around like the plague. Last season, the road block to commitment with Dyson was just their fluctuating feelings (and Bo’s mother), but now that the show has set her up with Lauren, the hurdles to their relationship are more explicit. Lauren has a girlfriend, Nadia, who’s been in a coma for years. Bo has the first clue Lauren needs to figure out how to save Nadia, an old metal nail given to her by the Morrigan, but neither of them have any idea how to proceed. They have a tenuous partnership at the moment, working to save Lauren’s girlfriend, but are still hopelessly attracted to each other. I’m not too fond of cases that split up Bo and Kenzi, and this week is yet another example of an intriguing character concept that gets bogged down in an overarching plot I just don’t care enough about.

The Case of the Week—involving one of Trick’s oldest friends whose recently deceased dancer husband has gone missing—leads Bo to a Lich who has taken to collecting various artists and eccentric personalities to indulge his mind. The Lich is immortal, feeding off of human flesh as well as accumulating a wide swath of experiential knowledge. That vast knowledge is exactly what Bo needs in order to get to the bottom of the nail she got from the Morrigan, so she brings Lauren along to some kind of sinister salon the Lich throws, making the reanimated dancer and a harpsichord soloist perform to satiate his intellectual desires.

According to Trick, a Lich theoretically keeps an item that contains his chi, which needs to be destroyed to defeat the Lich. There’s a nicely comedic detour into some Dorian Gray references, but after some playacting, it’s clear that the Lich keeps a big entourage of mindless cultural soldiers on hand as his chi containers. He chains Bo and Lauren up on a stage, and tries to force Bo to feed on Lauren so he may experience Bo’s feelings of unhinged passion. She refuses, so the Lich has his minions bring Lauren to his table, planning to consume her flesh.

Perhaps it’s that Bo is desperate to protect Lauren because of her romantic feelings, or the bullet in her gut, but whatever the reason, Bo taps into some seriously powerful succubus ability, draining the chi of every one of the Lich’s “dolls” before collapsing. She doesn’t remember any of it, but the Lich is defeated, but not before Bo extracts his knowledge about the nail. Nadia isn’t sick; she’s been cursed by an African shaman’s cursing nail. Find the piece of wood with Nadia’s nail and remove it, and she should return to normal. All in all, an interestingly creepy take on a Lich with some overarching plot movement, but one that felt particularly constrained by only a few locations (all interiors it seemed) and some heavy leaning on the already difficult Bo/Lauren relationship.

Over in the B-plot, Hale takes over Dyson’s security detail, which turns out to be babysitting Tori, the telepathic daughter of The Glaive, who is apparently the Attorney General of the Fae world. Right off the bat, the description in dialogue without the actual character is problematic. Lost Girl doesn’t have a huge effects budget, but it’s strange that the series couldn’t be trouble to actually cast that role and have the domineering parent involved somehow.

The whole plot reeked of budgetary constraints, confined to Trick’s bar and the girls’ run-down house. No new sets, one guest star, and a whole lot of telegraphed action. Kenzi wants to give the girl some fun, spicing her life up in the First Daughter or Chasing Liberty vein, or even First Kid. But a low-budget attempt of that tried-and-crash-and-burn plot is even more boring that the feature film version. At Kenzi’s urging, Hale relaxes the rules, but after a few drinks, Tori tricks Hale into calling her mom, and after he gets yelled at for interrupting work, he turns back to discover the girls are gone.

Hale finds Kenzi and Tori back at the girls’ house, and Kenzi makes it known that she thinks Tori is crazy—but only by making the universal silent sign for crazy, which Tori knows about because she’s telepathic. It’s another instance of telling instead of showing for the sake of being brief. We get no sense of why Tori is crazy, except for Dyson’s various interjections, as he recollects the various tactics Tori used to escape his watch when he started out on the detail. Those moments have elements of humor, but otherwise, this was another misuse of two reliable comic relief characters, with a generic romantic possibility thrown in at the end just for the hell of it.

There are elements in Lost Girl’s arsenal that I still find very intriguing and even refreshing. Ksenia Solo’s comedic timing, Anna Silk’s total commitment to whatever batshit scenario she winds up in, and the matter-of-fact portrayal of same-sex relationships—that doesn’t require bells and whistles to announce its progressiveness—are all compelling reasons to watch the show. But when it descends into paint-by-numbers storylines culled from well-worn sitcom tropes that also continue to separate the central partnership on the show, Lost Girl strays too far from its strengths.

Stray observations:

No mention of Dyson’s girlfriend, and despite Trick’s instructions that he and Bo get to the bottom of the case together, he gets bumped out halfway through in order to bring Lauren back to the forefront.

I’m a bit unclear on the pronunciation of “lich” since the way the characters say the word in this episode differs from how I heard it in Warcraft III back when I consistently played PC games.

So while Nadia sits in her pod, Lauren is overcome with emotion and kisses Bo. We all know this is going to end badly for the girl in the coma.